It appears God may have designed us to sleep poorly in the winter. This gives me a little misery-loves-company kind of comfort, since I sleep poorly all year long. But it’s worse now, when lack of sunlight, an excess of snacking and an ancient asteroid strike have me up most nights microwaving milk at 3 a.m.

Actually, it was 1:45 a.m. Monday when I was up doing the warm-milk routine. Also a graham cracker, which always seems to soothe my nerves. Heartburn was the ostensible reason but the real culprit was the Super Bowl. I’d fixed a platter of hummus and various dippable carbs for the occasion. Unimpressed by a few $4 million commercials, Andrea and I switched to reruns from “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” I still ate all the snacks.

So there I was, up as usual with the warm milk. It’s a home remedy I’ve used since I was a kid, when I also didn’t sleep well. During sleepovers my friends would always conk out before me. I continued the tradition into college, when I worked graveyard shifts slinging hash at Big Boy before nodding off in morning lectures.

Maybe I should go back to working nights now, since I’m up half the time anyway. Besides my natural night-owl makeup, very personal aging issues also wake me up. (Older guy readers will relate.) But now it seems the very structure of the universe may be to blame for causing us Northern Hemisphere types to have a lousy winter night’s sleep.

Biologist Neil Shubin writes in The New York Times that we have more than 2 trillion clocks in our DNA that govern our sleeping rhythms. These clocks are set to the sun hitting our eyes and brains. See, they think an asteroid slammed into the Earth more than 4 billion years ago, forming the moon and four seasons. Sun-deprived midwinter messes with that system, causing sleeping disorders and general crankiness.

No, I don’t get it either. But it looks to me like we can blame God for being sunless and sleepless in Grand Rapids as well as Seattle. Who do you think created all that cloud cover anyway? Who set the world awhirl with day and night, snow and sun, dinosaurs and asteroids? Wait, don’t answer that; I’m not up for another argument about evolution.

I’ve also read recently that older people have poorer short-term memory because they don’t sleep as well as younger adults. Great. In another 20 years I won’t even remember the “Dick Van Dyke Show” reruns.

If you, like me, fight to stay awake at 3 p.m. and can’t sleep 12 hours later, please let me know. I’d hate to think I’m the only one who’s got my days and nights backward.

To whom shall we turn for spiritual help at 3 a.m.? The Apostle Paul urges in 2 Corinthians, “as servants of God we commend ourselves in every way,” including “in hard work, sleepless nights and hunger.” If I can serve God while tossing and turning, excellent. Just give me a job to do. Because otherwise I’m just lying there worrying.

If I don’t get back to sleep, how am I going to get my work done in the morning? And if I don’t get my work done, how am I going to pay the bills? Wait, did I send the car insurance in yet? And what is that noise on the driver’s side? Should I take it in to Jerry’s Garage? And what is that pain in my left toe? Should I go to the doctor?

This is where I get up, make the warm milk, sit in my Martin Crane-style raggedy recliner and read something mind-calming. Lately it’s “Dombey and Son” by Charles Dickens, a yellowed old hardback. On its first page is inscribed, “Purchased in London England in an antique shop by Anna Dillon in 1971.”

This Anna had an active mind. Another page is filled with rows of names and numbers, apparently the prices of film, stamps and other items. The border of the opening illustration is crammed with Anna’s goals: “Marry. Housework, farmwork, childcare, writing & painting, crafts, recreation, National Guard.”

Wait, “National Guard”? I had her pegged as an up-and-coming Earth mother until then. Who knows? Maybe Anna was up in the middle of the night weighing her options.

In any case, I feel a little less alone reading Dickens, who used to walk for hours through the London streets when he couldn’t sleep. My 2 trillion inner clocks tick away as his words connect me to another busy mind in another, slower time: “I am an old-fashioned man in an old-fashioned shop, in a street that is not the same as I remember it. ... “